INTRODUCTION / DISCLAIMER

Maybe it’s the nitrogen that
makes divers such a special lot and us in particular, professional dive guides
and instructors, who are used to monstrous amounts of nitrogen in our bodies.
Maybe it’s the desert climate, that for 9 months a year makes us feel we’re
locked up inside a clothes dryer. Whatever the reason, the fact is that what
happens in Sharm el Sheikh just doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, or
so they say. This is a story worth telling. Mind you, it’s not my fault.
Everyone I know pushed me to do it.

I got myself into this predicament
on a typical day, one of many, when I showed up at the dive centre with an
alcohol breath and an uncertain step, my face clear evidence that I hadn’t
slept much. My colleagues were curious. The lovers of gossip wanted to know
“who” I was up with all night. I answered dryly that I was writing a book. I
wasn’t exactly lying; let’s put it this way: I was doing first-hand research
for a book that I didn’t yet know I would be writing. From then on, almost
every day they all started asking me how my book was coming along, what I was
writing about, if they were in my book and especially what I was writing about
them. I always answered saying I needed more real life stories to add. Everyone
became so insistent that I found myself forced to actually start writing. I did
start, but had very little time.

I then left Sharm el Sheikh and
having more free time on my hands, I started reconsidering this insane idea.
They, meaning staff members and friends, kept at it by e-mail, by phone…
Strange people, I thought. Maybe they really did deserve a book.

Diver
warning:
This book does not speak kindly of you, divers who make our lives miserable on
board. This guide is a bit different. I do apologize for the long “non-diver”
section.

Non-diver
warning:
A special section was created for you, so you too can understand something of
this book.

Reader
warning:
All the material in this book is based on true stories, real people and places
that (unfortunately) truly exist. Having no intention to respect the privacy of
any of the characters in the book, I started writing using their real names.
Then, the smartest of them paid good money, so I changed a few details (names,
places and dates), just enough to make the characters unidentifiable to PADI,
local authorities and their girlfriends. Steve, who didn’t pay a penny, is
still Steve in the book. Sorry mate!

Disclaimer: We do not take
any responsibility for possible break-ups, divorces, dismissals, or PADI
inspections. A few obscure tales have been reported in first-person, including
the name of the source, exactly as they had been told.

Enjoy your reading.

PLACES AND PEOPLE

We are talking of a small segment
of desert that runs along one of the most beautiful seas of the world. The
parched mountains, going from orange, ochre, red, beige and lilac to dark
chocolate and all the way to olive green (depending on the slant of the sun,
the season, the time of day, the viewpoint etc.) provide a natural setting that
is not to be found elsewhere. It hardly ever rains here and this is a blessing,
because when it does… it gets flooded.

The sea is the Red Sea, which is
not red at all, but midnight blue and aquamarine and only on particularly
ill-fated days, greenish. Due to an anomaly in space and time, Jacques Cousteau
discovered the Red Sea before the Phoenicians. The Red Sea is a Cousteau
trademark. Such an amazing sea and climate cannot but attract tourists and most
of all members of a particular tourist subspecies known as: divers, subacqueos, plongeurs, buzos, tauchers,
that we have the privilege and more often than not the obligation to take
underwater. To everyone else we teach how to dive and if they’re really not up
for it, we take them snorkelling, with mask, snorkel and fins, to discover
fishes and corals while splashing about on the surface. If they’re not into
that either, there are camel rides in the desert, jeep safaris, Saint Catherine
Monastery, Mount Moses, casinos, Pacha, beach bumming and an endless series of
bars; but at this point they’re not our business anymore.

The most commonly asked questions
from tourists to dive guides and instructors are, in order:

1) Do you live here?

2) Where are you from?

3) How many dives do you have?

4) Do you actually like living
here?

5) Do you think of doing this
your whole life? (Advice and suggestions follow)

The answers to these questions
usually create a sense of confusion in the inquirer. It is frankly quite
difficult to find a dive guide who works in Sharm but lives in Cairo, or who
takes the bus every day from Stockholm, round-trip of course. It is also a
challenge to identify nationalities, since everyone working here has blondish
hair and darkish skin because of the sun. It is finally just as complicated to
distinguish people’s native tongue, due to contaminations with the language commonly
spoken by Sharmers. But we will
discuss this new unofficial language later on.

The most commonly asked questions from diving
instructors to tourists are:

1) Are you a diver?

2) Did you ever try diving?

3) Where are you going tomorrow,
Tiran or Ras Mohammed?

4) Are you married?

5) What are you doing tonight?
(Advice and suggestions follow)

Even if you’ll never believe it,
in Sharm we work hard, really hard. We’re proud of this, because work, when it
involves passion, becomes a double gratification. There’s no place for lazy
bums here. They last so little that they go back to their home land terrified
and start doing whatever it was they were doing before with a lot more interest
and devotion. The population of dive guides and instructors can be over 1000,
depending on the season, climate, slant of the sun, etc. This community
includes English, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians,
Danish, Swedes, Swiss, Finnish, Australians, Americans, Argentinians,
Brazilians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Japanese, Russians and, obviously, a
large number of Egyptians. This international microcosm created the new
language of Sharmers: a mix of all the most commonly spoken languages with
Arabic.

This new language has become the
official language of taxi drivers, tour operators and carpet sellers. A classic
example of this is, “This carbet meya meya, sehr gut! Only talateen Egyptian
pound for you, Aleman!”

I’m sure you can imagine that at
the root of many quarrels, delays and misunderstandings in Sharm el Sheikh is a
tiny linguistic issue. To this we must add another factor: trivial cultural differences,
that also result in a series of shortcomings and misinterpretations between
foreigners and locals. These cultural differences are totally irrelevant as
they are only limited to: conventions, mentality, customs, viewpoints, concept
of time, behaviours, diet, clothes, shopping, social relations, relations
between the sexes, work, money, preferences, opening hours of banks, shops and
public offices. That’s all.

With regard to opening hours,
which I must admit I haven’t fully understood yet, expect banks and shops to
open and close several times a day, according to the hours of prayer. Don’t
count on anything being open 24 hours, except for a few supermarkets and the
sea.

Living in Sharm is, at any rate,
very easy indeed. It just takes a little getting used to.

Most often than not, in Sharm el
Sheikh you’ll feel like you’re on Candid Camera. From taxi drivers to skippers,
from dive guides to bank opening hours, you will think you are the victim of TV
hidden cameras, or of Murphy’s law. Keep in mind that in the most optimistic
possibility, nothing will ever go as planned. So be positive, learn the rules
of Egyptian conversation by heart and enjoy the sea, the colourful fishes, the
colourful corals, the Egyptians and the even more colourful tourists and a
touch of grey in the backroom of the local shops, just to rest your eyes a bit.

Get used to obstacles and
frustrations, delays, absurdities and dust. There’s a lot of dust flying all
over the place, making its way into your hair, your laptop, your shoes, your
most intimate and hidden things. What can you expect? We are in the desert
after all!

What kind of people can come
here? All types. No exclusions (now that I think about it, I haven’t seen many
citizens of Burkina Faso, but I’ll research the matter further). Tourists come
to Sharm because their friends and travel agencies tell them to, while foreign
residents end up here because friends and families, in the hope of getting rid
of them, told them that finding a job is easy. While tourists come and go so
quickly that it’s impossible to get a sense of their personal history, those
who work in Sharm have a lot of time to tell everyone else their most
fascinating and very personal stories. There’s no such thing as being born a
diving instructor. The ones who become instructors at a young age, get tired of
dealing with divers and fish in general and end up opening bars, restaurants,
real estate agencies and online magazines.

Only the tough stay on. These are
the ones who said no to something important: office, traffic, shop, cinema,
mother, girlfriend, taxes, bailiff. These are the ones who one day told themselves,
“At the end of a day’s work I haven’t seen a single barracuda, nor a soft
coral, nor a mask clearing, I’ve had it!” These are the hard-core Sharmers.
There’s no way of getting them back behind an office desk. Any other warnings?

Rinse vegetables thoroughly.

Never expect an appointment to be
kept.

Don’t dive below 30 metres.

Taxi drivers are your worst
enemies.

Beware of abrupt interference of space-time
holes.

FOR NON DIVERS

One becomes a diving instructor,
but is ‘pre-born’ a diver. Even if you don’t remember it, know that each and
everyone of us was drowned in liquid for approximately the first nine months of
our lives. Therefore, as PADI and Lao Tzu said, we are all bipeds ignorant of
the fact that we are really fishes. Arm yourselves with perseverance and start
remembering what you already know. A bit of water in your nose is no excuse.
It’s only water.

This brief introduction does not
replace a diving course. I’m just trying to make this book readable to those of
you who are not familiar with tanks, regulators, fins, masks, etc.

Diving is easy and not dangerous.
You must respect the rules and do the exercises, but most of all enjoy what
there is to see underwater. Tanks are filled with air and they don’t explode
unless you beat their neck with a hammer and regulators will always give you
air underwater, unless you drag them in the sand for days, you damage them,
sabotage them, or beat them with a heavy stick.

The BCD, or Buoyancy Control
Device, is a jacket that you inflate/deflate in order to:

a) float,

b) sink,

c) none of the above.

You have to get used to it.
Improper use of a BCD, as stated by manufacturers, can result in:

1 yo-yo effect,

2 uncontrolled ascents,

3 uncontrolled descents,

but also: traumas, injuries, diving
diseases and irreversible damage to corals. A weight belt is necessary to bring
you down; otherwise, when wearing a wetsuit and full equipment, you would float
on the surface like a buoy, when the point of diving is to stay under the
surface of the sea. How many weights you should put on your weight belt is
constant topic of discussion on board between dive guides/instructors and divers.
To know how deep you are, there is a depth gauge. To know how much air is left
in your tank, there is a manometer. These two items, more precisely their
reading and interpretation, are also frequent topics of discussion between the
above-mentioned anthropological groups.

Nitrogen: please don’t start
asking how this happens or doesn’t happen, nitrogen enters our tissues after
each dive, depending on depth and duration of the dive. Full stop. Up until a
certain level everything is fine, over that certain level you’re in for a tour
of the hyperbaric chamber. If you shoot up like a balloon, same story. And what
happens when they put you in the hyperbaric chamber? They recompress you. Why?
Because it’s good for you. At depth, nitrogen has the effect of smoking a
joint. This is not a good excuse to go deep (and this is another frequent topic
of discussion).

To know how much nitrogen you
have absorbed and therefore how long you can stay at a given depth, but also a
lot of other important things, there are dive computers and tables. A dive
computer takes care of this and lots more, including making strange noises and
showing video games. You need a mask to be able to see properly underwater and
learning to clear your mask is fundamental to becoming a diver. Mask clearing
is the most dreaded exercise for both diving students and instructors.

Wetsuit: it protects you from the
cold.

Fins: if you don’t know what they
are, this book is not for you.

CORALS

Whatever you’ve been told at home
or at the travel agent’s, corals are alive. Whether alive or dead, you are not
allowed to touch corals. Full stop. If I catch anyone, say your prayers and if
I don’t catch you, a stonefish will. A stonefish looks like a dead clump of
coral, but its sting is lethal.

FISHES

See the section on corals, same
story.

N.B.: turtles, octopuses,
shrimps, snails, molluscs and lobsters should not be molested, nor grilled, nor
should you attempt riding on their backs, as they are all protected species.
You are not. You’re only protected by your diving insurance and common sense,
if you have them.

At this point, I bet you’re dying
to become divers. Why not? It’s super cool! It’s full of colourful fishes!
You’ll feel weightless! One day you could become instructors and have a life
just like mine!

(If you answered ‘mmmhhh…?’ to
all these statements, turn the page).

A diving course lasts
approximately 4 days, 7-8 hours a day. There’s no difference with the diving
courses you take back home, where you go 2 hours a week, for a month. Meshi?
What do you do in a diving course?

You REGRESS. As fishes became
amphibians and then mammals and then humans, to go back to being fishes you’ll
have to go through a clumsy frog-like phase in the pool and then at sea. That’s
life.

The first level is Open Water
Diver, the second is Advanced, the third is Rescue and then we get into the
jungle of acronyms of various diving agencies: PADI, BSAC, SSI, NAUI, etc. In
this jungle, different names are used to say the same thing: a Divemaster is a
Diveleader, a Divecon, or a 3 star, basically a dive guide. CMAS, FIAS, FIPSAS,
EULF still use stars like hotels and ski schools. An instructor is more or less
the same everywhere. You will hear a lot of talk about PADI.

PADI

In the beginning there was Chaos.
There were people diving with strange hoses, metal boxes on their heads,
cooking gas tanks they washed and filled at the gas station. There were naval
or military diving courses, where people dived with spanners, shears, picks,
welders and mines. Few of them ever came back. Then came Jacques Cousteau, with
his sci-fi designed equipment, jealous of his secrets, of his dive tables and
of the exact location of the Thistlegorm wreck, which he never revealed. Scuba
diving existed, but it was groping in the dark, like Captain Nemo’s aquanauts
if their helmet windscreen wipers had broken down.

And then there was PADI. It
formed out of the Chaos, as a clump of light from plasmatic matter and said,
“LET SCUBA DIVING BE RECREATIONAL”. And so it was.

The first day it created
Standards and Procedures.

The second day it created the
instructor manual.

The third day it created the
modular course system and the Master Scuba Diver rating.

The fourth day it created the
PADI Instructor.

The fifth day, the Quality
Assurance Department.

…and since PADI is American and
week-ends are sacred there, the sixth and seventh day, it took a break.

The first Course Director
preached “positive reinforcement” and the learning pyramid structure. He
preached the equality of mankind with regard to mask clearing and the right of
any person of goodwill to become a diver. His word spread, reaching Tibet, Siberia
and the fried chickens of Kentucky, circulating from Bangladesh to the Bismarck
Archipelago; new schools and new followers originated everywhere.

Without PADI, we would be
nothing. Without PADI, a whole lot of divers, instead of enjoying the fishes,
ignorant of the sacred principles of recreation and buoyancy, would be scraping
the bottom of the sea, holding bolts, ropes, spanners in their hands with
blackened masks. Without PADI, there wouldn’t be as many divers. Without all
those divers, no one would ever dream of paying us good money for lounging
about all day amid boats and swimming pools and chatting with women on board.
Without PADI, mark my words instructors and friends, you would all be working
for free. And for those of you who do, you’re doing something wrong.

PADI has no limits for expansion:
it conquered the world; it will aim at the stars. PADI will take over NASA and
the first recreational astronaut course will be a PADI course.

THE ART OF EGYPTIAN CONVERSATION

(for experienced survivors only)

‘Mushkela’, ‘problem’ in Arabic, is the word that you will hear most
often, followed by the second most commonly used word, ‘mafish’, ‘there isn’t, it’s over’ and then, ‘mafish mushkela’, ‘there is no problem’. Only when you hear the
latter should you start seriously worrying, the rest is ordinary
administration. In Egypt you will not encounter many people with a true passion
for ball games or darts, very few will be busy playing beach volley or
swimming. You will however see many boatmen playing backgammon; but don’t let
this fool you: the game is only an excuse for conversing. While in Italy one of
the chief activities is talking about food and cuisine, in the UK about the
weather and weather forecasts, in Egypt people converse at work, at home, at
the marketplace, or while smoking shisha. As soon as someone has something to
say about, let’s say, the restaurant bill, or the shortest route to take in a
taxi, the art of conversation is on. It is an art, a sport, a passion that
brings together all social classes. It is a millenary tradition that follows
precise rules.

DECALOGUE OF THE
EGYPTIAN CONVERSATION

1) The point of Egyptian
conversation is not reaching an objective, whether common or individual, nor
reaching any agreement or compromise: the point of Egyptian conversation is the
conversation in and for itself.

2) One can deduce from axiom 1
that the length of Egyptian conversation is not quantifiable in terms of time.

3) In mathematics, Egyptian
conversation is comparable to two parallel lines that only meet at infinity,
or, if you prefer, that never meet.

4) Egyptian conversation is
played one against one or in couples, but never in odd numbers. If, for
example, you are conversing with an Egyptian man and a friend of yours steps in
to help you, the Egyptian man will never speak to your friend but only to you,
unless someone else steps in to help him, thus forming natural couples of
players. Vice versa, if you are conversing with an Egyptian man and another
Egyptian man starts conversing with him (for example in a public office, in a
supermarket, at the airport, etc.), the former will completely ignore you and
start conversing with the other Egyptian man, for an undetermined length of
time as seen in paragraph 2, only to start conversing with you again in the
end, but not from the point you left off, from the very beginning.

5) Egyptian conversation is an
exclusively male privilege. The woman at your side who tries conversing with an
Egyptian man will be completely ignored and he will only converse with you.

6) Use of hands and moustaches in
Egyptian conversation.

The use of hands and moustaches
is vitally important: in Egyptian conversation the hands are kept open and
continuously moved around in circles, with sudden turning of the palms upwards.

The aggressiveness of the player
is not measured by the tone of voice, always loud, nor by the number of
insults, but by the elevation of his forearms; the higher the forearms are
raised, the more aggressive the player. N.B.: if the forearms are raised higher
than the speaker’s moustaches, better let it go and make a run for it.

7) Being the owner of moustaches
ensures a priori an advantage of 72 points in the conversation.

8) Being the owner of moustaches
and of a gold bracelet ensures that mathematics and all the exact sciences
become questionable, as expressed by the owner of these two assets. To make an
example, if, calculator at hand, you question the bill to the owner of
moustaches and of a gold bracelet, he will add up the total several times with pen
and paper and in the end, among the different results, he will choose the one
that suits him at best.

9) No jokes are admitted during
the conversation. If someone cracks a joke, he will lose a point and start
over.

10) No business conversation can
start without involving tea or coffee.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
AND HISTORICAL REMARKS

It is thanks to the new theories
of Dr. H. D. Paccard about the interpretation of hieroglyphics and to his
translation of the famous shaft named “The owl that doesn’t look like an owl,
but nevertheless pretends to be sleeping on the drinker”, that it was possible
to piece together the origins of Egyptian conversation, or at least to
understand when this ludic form of behaviour called ‘conversation’ appeared in
Egypt. With regard to this and to give credit to the scholar who was the first
to reveal this theory, I would like to mention the article of Dr. J. Bradbury
McIntosh, published on last year’s National Geographic Magazine. The theory on
conversation met with great success in all academic circles, so much as it
travelled outside the American borders and reached Russia, where Professor
Isaac Ivaneviç Popovniac used it as foundation for his “Theory of Elements of Conversation at the Origin of Middle Eastern
Social Behaviour”. A very famous article followed on “Archaeology Today” in
June of the same year, which I would like to mention here. Unfortunately, I
cannot. I cannot because, as a result of that article, fanatics everywhere
unleashed a series of threats and other things, not so nice to report here,
which forced the famous magazine to withdraw all printed copies immediately and
to apologize with everyone who was offended. The article is therefore not available
anymore. There is another very interesting, brilliant article by Helmut
Weinberger, though, which appeared on Le Figaro on the 22 of September of the
same year, entitled “Attila and Gengis
Khan as Antithetic Elements to Conversation”. His article didn’t have
better luck, it was misinterpreted and the most fervent groups took turns
ransacking the head office of Le Figaro. Professor Weinberger, though, had
given a false address, as well as a false driving licence, credit card and
e-mail address. He escaped the siege and was never found. To make up for it,
the theory was subsequently re-elaborated, excluding any Hittite influences on
the Egyptian conversation, but researching consistent elements as far back as
in the game of chess in Ancient China. Scholars thus also attributed to Ancient
Egypt the origins of the card game ‘whist’
and the last enlightening publication, which was never challenged by anyone,
became “The Game of Whist and Bridge as
Origins of the Art of Conversation and of Tavern Stories”, by Professor
Alfred Stanley Calthrop Burgess, article that appeared here and there.

THE DUTY FREE STORE

The Duty Free store is probably
the most precious institution in Sharm el Sheikh. In a country where imported
alcohol costs ten times more than in its place of origin and where, exception
made for beer and a few types of wine, no one would even dream of venturing
into the perils of local production, survival drives us to countless stratagems
and devices in order to satisfy our needs. One of them consists in asking the
passports to tourists, to get our hands on the limited amount of alcohol that
every foreigner has the right to purchase at the duty free shop, during their
stay and at a reasonable price. This situation produced a special kind of
business and a good dose of fawning, that in turn resulted in a very good
service on board of diving boats. This is how the instructors who drank the
most, became the nicest, most patient and professional. This practice also
imposed a different social order. While in most of the planet the status of
someone is determined by the car they own, the clothes they wear, the type of
holidays they make, or the size of the house they live in, in Sharm el Sheikh
the social order of a person is determined by the bottles of alcohol displayed
on the bar. This has nothing to do with money, like in most civilized
communities; the value of the bottles has everything to do with the person’s
savoir-faire. Thus, whoever has the most bottles to display, will see his
popularity rising. Whoever has a lot of alcohol, also has a lot of friends.

SHAMANDURA GENERATION - PART ONE

The rais, the captain of Amir
Galal Abdallah II, was a stocky little man with a round face, covered in spiky
greyish hairs of unequal length and gleaming and shrewd blue eyes. He had only
three interests in life: the money of the lunches sold on board, making sure
that no one would go inside the lower deck wet and making sure that no one
would block the marine toilet with toilet paper. His primary source of
happiness, in a nutshell, was yelling fowl words to other skippers and playing
mean jokes on dive guides. He was always smiling, so that most people mistook
him for a jolly and cunning old fellow. This was only because Arabic is a
difficult language. His name was Farouk, he was taking me to the strait of
Tiran and, oblivious to the evolution of local fashion, was still wearing
pyjamas.

If someone had materialized
himself in that precise spot and precise moment, that is in Gordon reef on a
Thursday, without passing from the airport, the taxi ride, etc… without the
basic introduction to a new and to say the least exotic country, he would have
thought this was the place where lunatics go when they escape and disappear. As
for me, I had heard for the first time of the strait of Tiran and of Gordon
reef on that same bloody morning and, in spite of the crystal clear water and
the shining sun, I couldn’t help feeling that something was really wrong. A
certain number of tourists were strolling on the reef with their plastic ‘reef
shoes’, as instructed by travel agencies; the water was swarming with potential
self-murderers clutching rings, life jackets, or unfortunate passer-bys. On a
nearby boat, a group of go-go dancers were shaking their bodies to the sound of
merengue music and all around a multitude of skippers wearing turbans and sunglasses
were making their way in the crowded waters beeping their horns full blast.

The entire crossing had been a
disaster. An hour after leaving the jetty, I was still unable to tell how many
people I had on board. Just like the mysterious small discs in the famous
Borges nightmare, capable of multiplying and dividing themselves, defiant of
every mathematical rule, the passengers I had been assigned were 25, then 21
and even 28. I also knew that I was supposed to go around and ask how many
people wanted lunch, but when I had gone to tell the chef, he had started
making strange hand gestures, as if counting; he couldn’t keep his hands still,
so we had almost reached the dive site and I had not been able to make him
understand at what time to serve lunch or the number of guests who were eating.
The captain, who had ignored me during the whole navigation, was now yelling in
Arabic. He was yelling at me and, following the fixed rule in effect at any
given latitude, he kept repeating the same incomprehensible phrase in an
increasingly loud voice, as though it had been a problem of decibels. I had no
idea what he wanted, but whatever it was, it was urgent, because all around me
people from other boats had also started yelling. They were making strange
gestures, jumping about, hunching their shoulders, mimicking someone who was
cold and was wearing a coat, or something heavy on his back.

I decided to figure it out by
trial and error. I walked all over the boat, pointing to any object at hand: a
ring, a pair of shoes, a life jacket, a saucepan. Only when I touched a diving
tank there was a certain murmur of approval, followed by thanks to someone up
above. Without question I wore my equipment and the deckhand pushed a putrid
piece of rope in my hand, gesturing as if he were possessed. Everyone was
chanting the same word, without pause, “…m..d..ra!” I felt incredibly stupid.
During my entire career, nothing of the sort had ever happened to me. They were
all pointing their index finger downward, in a way that could have meant a
million different things. In the end, someone from a neighbouring boat yelled
something in barely comprehensible English. They wanted me to tie that line
somewhere underwater, no one explained precisely where. I candidly asked the
reason for this. At this point, they became really furious and raising eyes and
moustaches to the sky, they started whining as though something terrible was
about to happen to the boat. Apparently, I was the chosen one who could prevent
this impending disaster. For all I knew, the word they were chanting,
“Shamandura! Shamandura!” was the name of the supermarket under McDonald’s in
Naama Bay. I couldn’t take it anymore and I burst out, “Now, what the hell do
you want from the supermarket!”

I understood, but it was too late. The current
was turning, pushing the line of boats against the reef; I should have fixed
the line of the last boat on the bottom of the sea to avoid what… happened in
an instant.

When I jumped in the water, there
was nothing left to be done. There was a racket of engines; dozens of fenders
squeaked. A few boats hit the reef; the stern-rails of others broke in the
hurried attempt to escape, throwing dozens of snorkellers into a panic. No one
was injured, but a great deal of people were so frightened that they said they
wouldn’t to go out on a boat again. A crowd of people, equipped with reef
shoes, found shelter by climbing on top of the reef, only to be forgotten there
and rescued a couple of hours later by the last boats leaving Jackson reef.

It was my first day of work in
the Red Sea: I was fired.

Before kicking me out, they made
sure I understood the meaning of the word shamandura. It means mooring, but
especially tying the boat on any given point on the bottom, whether a rusty
metal ring, a sunken buoy, a piece of rotten line, or even a clump of coral
(!). I discovered that this ‘not exactly healthy’ duty (it is not good for the
body to go up and down between dives) was the true essence of the work of a
dive guide in Sharm, as well as a reason of pride and respect. I later realized
that a dive guide, to be respected here, had to, first and foremost, be a good
connoisseur of knots and shamanduras, know where to find mooring spots or
invent them and most of all, be the first at the shamandura. A true Red Sea
dive guide is, before anything else, a shamandura-man, a challenger of
nitrogen. There were many more days after this one, many more years, not all of
them like this, but almost. No, I didn’t escape back to Europe like many do, I
stayed, determined to learn where the shamanduras were, to become familiar with
the reefs and the currents, the Arabic language and the crews. With time I did
gain better knowledge of all these things, I increased my dive guide ranking
and my normal nitrogen tolerance. But, well, with regard to learning Arabic…

Gianni did not have
better luck. Like me, he had boasted great expertise of the dive sites, resulting
from thorough research in all the bars of Naama Bay. On his first day of work,
he was shipped off to Ras Mohammed, down at the very tip of Sinai, to be clear,
the place that travel agents love to describe as the Gardens of Allah. He was
sent there with the usual load of divers, snorkellers, good-for-nothing and
‘never seen the sea before’. The sea was a bit wavy, as usual, the sun was
roasting and colourful fishes were swarming just under the surface of the
water. There was not a cloud in sight; it would have been impossible to spot
one, even if willing to pay Sterling Gold. The crew members were in a bad mood.